The Emperor Has No Facts — Sean Spicer Confirms Trump's Delusions

As you've likely heard, in another egregious display of ego before country, President Trump dedicated the first ten minutes of his meeting with
congressional leaders on Monday to repeating his deluded claim that 3-5 million illegal votes cost him
the popular
vote:

The president was joined by Republican and Democratic leaders from the House and Senate for a reception in the State Dining Room.

The Washington Post reported that Trump spent the first 10 minutes of the gathering rehashing the election campaign. During that period, he made his
claim about the illegal votes.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., alluded to it, telling reporters that Trump and the lawmakers talked about "the different Electoral
College, popular vote." Asked if anything surprised her about the meeting, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said, "I won't even go into
that."

Today, Sean Spicer confirmed that the
President does in fact continue to believe and state his belief that 3-5 million illegal votes were cast in favor of Hillary Clinton:

"My point to you is, to ask us on day two, he made a comment last night on something he's believed for a long, long time," Spicer said. Spicer
later added that it's not his job to say whether he personally believes millions of ballots were illegally cast.

A number of Republicans in Congress are choosing to believe in reality rather than to accept the alternative facts put forth by President
Trump:

Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) told reporters at the Capitol on Tuesday that he’s seen “no evidence” of voter fraud.

And Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who was critical of Trump during the campaign, urged the president to stop making the claims.
“I am begging the president: Share with us the information you have about this or please stop saying it,” Graham said.

NPR correspondent Mara Liasson noted that 3-5 million illegal votes would be the "biggest scandal in American electoral history" and asked if the
President truly believes this is what happened, why isn't he calling for it to be investigated?

I find that to be a very very important question. If he truly believes that 3-5 million illegal votes were cast, why isn't he as President of
the United States doing something about it? If he doesn't believe it, then he's clearly lying and in doing so, casting doubt on the integrity of the
American voting process in order to protect his fragile ego.

On October 17th, Donald Trump telegraphed an excuse which was likely
intended to be one for a loss of not just the popular vote, but the election itself:

Then there’s the issue of illegal immigrants voting. The following comes from a 2014 report from the Washington Post. This article was
entitled, “Could non-citizens decide the November election?” Here’s some excerpts. “More than 14 percent of non-citizens in both 2008 and 2010
samples indicated that they were registered to vote.” Oh, isn’t that wonderful.

“Because non-citizens tend to favor Democrats,” — to put it mildly — “Obama won more than 80 percent of the votes of non-citizens in the
2008 sample …” You don’t read about this, right? They don’t tell you about this. “…we find that this participation was large enough to
plausibly account for Democratic victories is various close elections.” OK? All right? “Non-citizen votes could have given Democrats the pivotal
60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health care reform … and other Obama administration priorities.” Now, it continues,
“It is possible that non-citizen votes were responsible for Obama’s 2008 victory in North Carolina.”

From this we can get an idea of what he's citing as "evidence" (when he bothers to do that much). The problem is that not only isn't it proof of
massive voter fraud to the tune of 3-5 million votes — or even 3-5 thousand votes — what's he was citing back before the election was in fact
thoroughly torn apart by the very people who'd collected the data:

Trump accurately quotes from the blog post. But the authors’ results are contested by a number of academics, including those who administer
and manage the data on which it is based.

The study relied on data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, which is administered by YouGov/Polimetrix and managed by Harvard
University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Richman and Earnest estimated the number of noncitizens who voted nationwide based on those
in the survey who self-identified as noncitizens who voted.

“Our best guess, based upon extrapolations from the portion of the sample with a verified vote, is that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008
and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010,” Richman and Earnest wrote in the Post.

In a blistering rebuke of that study, the managers of the database on which the article by Richman and Earnest was based wrote in Electoral Studies
that “measurement errors” in the survey led to a “biased estimate of the rate at which non-citizens voted in recent elections. The results, we
show, are completely accounted for by very low frequency measurement error; further, the likely percent of non-citizen voters in recent US elections
is 0.”

“Their finding is entirely due to measurement error,” one of the authors, Stephen Ansolabehere of Harvard and the principal investigator of CCES,
wrote to us in an email. “Measurement errors happen. People accidentally check the wrong box in surveys. The rate of such errors in the CCES is very
small, but such errors do happen. And when they do happen on a question such as citizenship, researchers can easily draw the wrong inference about
voting behaviors. Richman and Earnest extrapolate from a handful of wrongfully classified cases (of non-citizens).”

How do the database managers know? Ansolabehere explained, “We asked people in successive years their citizenship. That minimizes the error. Upon
doing so we find NO INSTANCES of voting among people stating consistently that they are non-citizens.”

I watched that whole, .. strange questions for a day 2 of a presidency.

I think he handled most stupid questions well.

Example: Reporter with angry face: How is there are 21000 vacancies at the VA ?
( WTF: did they resign yesterday ? Or may it be an inherited problem ? )

May I ask with all due respect:

Is your intention to attack everything Trump related because you are convinced that once you have chosen a side , all means and matters are necessary
to "defeat the enemy" , even if they are sometimes minor or ridiculous ?

Ignore the good to prevent momentum, over emphasize the bad, to gain traction ?

I ask this.. because.. its starting to look like searching for nails on low tide. (And in my opinion becoming counter productive )

Individual guesses about illegal immigrants followed up by more guess work about how many of them voted is anything but evidence of anything.

If you had any evidence to support illegal voting you wouldn't need to ask random people to answer those questions and imply that they are meaningful.
You could actually provide some evidence for what your saying. But you can't so you rely on unsupported implications and guess work.

originally posted by: avgguy
Do you think there are illegal immigrants living in America?
If so how many?
Now, after answering the top to questions how many do you think vote illegally?

I'd say probably less than 1% try to vote in our presidential election.

Why would you think most of the people sneaking in here to work give a #### about American democracy and our elections? To them, its about sending as
much money back home to help their families as they can and getting in and out without getting caught.

On October 17th, Donald Trump telegraphed an excuse which was likely
intended to be one for a loss of not just the popular vote, but the election itself:

LOL! For the last few weeks you and your media had been pushing a Russian conspiracy theory WITH NO EVIDENCE to back it up. The lack of self awareness
is mind boggling. You yourself were posting fake news almost daily during the campaign. Now you're hear to expose the truth? HA!

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